Hi everyone 👋
As part of our ongoing mission to provide the best self-hosted audio platform possible, we're investigating how we might add support for other audio formats and projects in addition to improving our current music and podcast publication tools. A big format that is underrepresented in the self-hosted world is audiobooks.
Audiobooks are becoming a lot more popular these days, but a lot of them are published directly to DRM-laden platforms such as Audible or need to be downloaded and played on a local player. We would like to do for audiobooks what we have previously done for podcasts: support the format natively and give users the tools to publish and consume audiobooks in a self-hosted and optionally federated way.
To do this, we need to do discuss this process with people who have experience with audiobooks to work out the following:
Publication
- What format does an audiobook typically use?
- What metadata is required?
- How does the publishing flow work?
- What licenses are typically used when publishing audiobooks freely?
Listening
- What playback features does an audiobook player need?
- How should a library be managed?
This thread is going to be a place to answer these (and more) questions as we delve into the feature a bit more.
Looking forward to hearing your ideas! 🎉